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Employee grousing spurs PR crisis for Weight Watchers

David Kirchhoff, the president and CEO of Weight Watchers, earned $2.96 million in 2011. Singer Jessica Simpson signed a contract to be a celebrity endorser for Weight Watchers last year that pays her a cool $3 million. Singer Jennifer Hudson and basketball star Charles Barkley, among others, have also received millions to endorse the brand.

So it’s little surprise that Weight Watcher employees—some of whom complain about barely making minimum wage—feel underpaid and undervalued. And in a bit of a nightmare scenario for the company, its employees’ complaints made it to the front page of The New York Times recently.

But this isn’t the standard “complaining about compensation” piece, because the manner in which this story became public is unusual.

According to a statement Weight Watchers sent me via email on Monday, the company confirms that, “The discussion among our [employees] took place on message boards on our Weight Watchers hosted communication hub.” It’s on that very site that employee complaints about compensation poured in by the hundreds.

Social media policy to prevent PR crisis?

So here’s a question: Should Weight Watchers have had a policy in place that governed the types of “acceptable” comments it would allow to be posted on the internal website it hosted and paid for? Should they have directed employees to lodge complaints or raise concerns by emailing a specific address instead of allowing its own site to become a group forum for grousing?

I couldn’t help thinking that Weight Watchers could have helped prevent this story from bubbling up to the surface simply by moderating their site more carefully. Sure, nothing would have stopped employees from complaining on third party websites, but it would have been much more difficult for them to communicate without a central website to visit, especially because the workforce is diffused and decentralized.

A Weight Watchers spokesperson told me via email, “We have begun gathering feedback in a thorough proactive process and will make changes to our compensation system later this year.” The company pledges to provide “updates on our compensation system through emails and posts on our internal employee website.”

The issue Weight Watchers now has on its hands—the issue of the huge gap between executive vs. employee compensation—is one of the toughest ones for any company to handle. I’ve written more about that issue here.

So what do you think? Please leave your thoughts in the comments section below.